Teen Spaces in Libraries

Kelly Czarnecki summarizes the teen areas of five different libraries for School Library Journal.

And huzzah! Libraries with teen sections for gaming lead to teens using other, more traditional library services.

Kaitlin Hoke, teen services coordinator at the East Library, a branch of the Pikes Peak Library District in Colorado, also finds that teens at her library take advantage of other library services as well as gaming. She says she’ll never forget the day that one of their notorious gamers asked a librarian to help him with a school assignment. This is exactly what librarians hope for—kids come to the teen center to play a game and then are comfortable enough to ask for homework help or check out a book.

Better Book Titles

Also nabbed from Miss Kathleen at Mentalfloss: Better Book Titles!

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!

Some of my favourites:

Bestsellers On the Day You Were Born

From Miss Kathleen at MentalFloss: find out what books were on the New York Times bestseller list on the day you were born! (Or any other day, really.)

Mine, fiction only:

1. THE COVENANT, James A. Michener
   
2. FIRESTARTER, Stephen King
   
3. THE KEY TO REBECCA, Ken Follett
   
4. THE FIFTH HORSEMAN, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre
   
5. LOON LAKE, E.L. Doctorow
   
6. RAGE OF ANGELS, Sidney Sheldon
   
7. THE TENTH COMMANDMENT, Lawrence Sanders
   
8. THE ORIGIN, Irving Stone
   
9. COME POUR THE WINE, Cynthia Freeman
   
10. THE SECOND LADY, Irving Wallace
    
11. FANNY, Erica Jong
    
12. THE SPIKE, Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss
    
13. THE RING, Danielle Steel
    
14. KANE & ABEL, Jeffrey Archer
    
15. RANDOM WINDS, Belva Plain
    

Ray Bradbury Helps a Library

Ray Bradbury helps a library and really likes Bo Derek. He also hates the internet:

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

Does he know he can look up pictures of Bo Derek on the internet? Someone should tell him.

Tangent aside, Mr. Bradbury has high praise for the library:

Fiscal threats to libraries deeply unnerve Mr. Bradbury, who spends as much time as he can talking to children in libraries and encouraging them to read.

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Digital Lending 101

From the Dear Author blog, Digital Lending: How it works and who allows it. An exceptionally good guide of interest to anyone owning or considering owning an e-reader.

E-book Piracy

Jenn Webb has written an article called Book Piracy: Less DRM, More Data for the O'Reilly Radar. She interviewed Brian O'Leary on the subject.

Some highlights:

First, the method for counting downloads of pirated books is clunky at best. Second, you can't say that every download is equivalent to a lost sale. Some are, but there's at least some likelihood that the pirated titles either spurred sales or represented a download that never would have resulted in a sale anyway.

The other thing, too, is you've got to look at where the downloads occur. If it's a North American title and the downloads occurred in Romania, I'm not that worried about it if I'm a publisher. It actually, if anything, says to me I should be moving my English language rights and my translation rights faster.

It's not that piracy is not a problem, it's just that it's not demonstratively a problem until you know what's actually happening.

Some companies are focused on applying fairly strict DRM software to their digital books. I'm pretty adamant on DRM: It has no impact whatsoever on piracy. Any good pirate can strip DRM in a matter of seconds to minutes. A pirate can scan a print copy easily as well. DRM is really only useful for keeping people who otherwise might have shared a copy of a book from doing so.

Absolutely agreed. Any code can be broken.

I think piracy has become more acute with ebooks, not because ebooks are easily pirated but because ebooks are easily visible. So, for example, if I'm living in South Africa and I speak English, but I want to read Nora Roberts, and Nora Roberts is only published in North America, I might have to wait through a four-year cycle to get her latest book. That lead time made sense when it was about ink on paper. But if it's an ebook, as a reader, I want to read it today — I love Nora Roberts, and I'd pay for her latest book, but I can't get it here because there's no service that will sell me an ebook in South Africa. That's when piracy starts to occur. Readers say: "I would have paid for it, but they wouldn't give it to me. They frustrated my demand."

I think this frustrated demand is a big reason for piracy, either of music or movies or books. While new music is pretty available if you want to consent to using iTunes (and some don't), some older things are quite difficult to find. Movies, too; if I go to my local movie rental place, I can find new things alright, but anything older than maybe ten years is quite iffy.

Unruly Tweens

At first I sort of snickered at this article in the Manhattan local news - Librarian Wants Police to Crack Down on Unruly Tweens.

An Upper West Side librarian says unruly tweens have become such a threatening menace to her and her staff that she needs police protection.

"They're 12 and they have no respect for us," said Bloomingdale Library manager Rebecca Donsky at a recent 24th Precinct Community Council meeting, her voice shaking with emotion as she pleaded for help controlling the youngsters.

Come on, twelve year olds?

Then I thought about it a little more and it occurred to me that I have no idea how to handle unruly twelve year olds. What are they into these days? What would I be allowed to say? I imagine I couldn't grab their arms and haul them toward the door or anything. Not to mention I might not be able to! While I'm stronger than I look, I look like what I am - 5'3" if you're being generous. Kids are tall these days, and I'm going to guess I can't put them in a goose neck arm hold. Which I would need to brush up on anyway.

I am, however, pretty sure this won't happen:

"I want to give them a way to channel their energy," Donsky said. "If they're angry, don't call me names, write a poem."

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You are a pushover
I wish daddy loved me?